A practical guide to overtime in 2026: the 48h/week cap, the minimum 75% premium, compensation with paid time off and the employer's record-keeping duties.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
Working beyond schedule looks like an operational detail, but it is in fact one of the areas most closely checked by the Labour Inspectorate and one of the most frequent sources of disputes with employees. The Labour Code (Codul Muncii) sets clear rules on when overtime is allowed, how much an employee may work and how the effort must be compensated. Here is what an SME owner or HR manager needs to know in 2026.
Overtime is time worked beyond normal working hours — that is, beyond 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week. The law imposes two cumulative conditions:
A general consent given in advance (for example, a contract clause by which the employee “accepts from the outset” any hours beyond schedule) has no value — the law treats it as null. Just as important: refusing to work overtime cannot be sanctioned as a disciplinary matter.
The only exception to the consent rule is force majeure and urgent work intended to prevent or remove the consequences of an accident. Only in these situations may the employer order overtime without prior consent.
The central rule is that maximum working time, including overtime, may not exceed 48 hours a week (art. 114 of the Labour Code).
By way of exception, this threshold may be exceeded temporarily, on one essential condition: the average calculated over a reference period of no more than 4 months must not exceed 48 hours a week. In other words, a 52-hour week is acceptable only if it is balanced by shorter weeks, so that the average over those four months stays within the limit.
This is where the most frequent risk for SMEs hides: the company monitors overtime week by week, but loses sight of the average over the reference period. A year of repeated peaks can exceed the cap even if no single week, taken on its own, looks problematic.
You will often come across the limit of 8 overtime hours a week (or, equivalently, roughly 32 hours a month). It is not a separate cap, but the arithmetic consequence of the 48-hour one: for a full-time employee on 40 hours, the gap up to the 48-hour cap leaves room for at most 8 overtime hours.
The distinction matters in practice for two reasons:
In other words: remember 48 as the legal rule and 8 as a practical benchmark for full-time work — not the other way round.
The Labour Code imposes a clear order of compensation. Time off takes priority over money.
Step 1 — paid hours off. As a rule, overtime is compensated with paid hours off granted within the following 90 calendar days after it is worked (art. 122). During those hours off, the employee receives the corresponding salary.
Step 2 — the premium, only if time off is not possible. If time off cannot be granted within the legal deadline, overtime is paid with a premium of at least 75% of the base salary, for each hour worked (art. 123). This is a minimum threshold: a higher percentage may be negotiated through the collective or individual contract.
The order matters. An employer cannot simply choose to pay the premium if compensation with time off was possible — the logic of the law is that rest comes first.
A few situations have their own rules, which can be cumulated with overtime:
In practice, these premiums can overlap: an overtime hour worked at night, on a public holiday, can accumulate several increases over the basic hourly rate.
The law protects certain categories:
The employer has a duty to keep a clear record of the hours worked by each employee, including overtime. This is not a formality: the time record is the first document checked in an ITM inspection and the basis on which salary entitlements are correctly calculated.
The absence of records or failure to pay overtime correctly attracts administrative fines. Fine amounts are updated periodically by law, so an employer must check the amount in force at the date of the inspection; the point to remember is that the financial exposure is significant, and the burden of proof lies with the company.
Suppose an employee with a base hourly rate of 40 lei who works 10 overtime hours in a month, and the company cannot grant time off within the 90 days:
If instead the company grants paid hours off within the deadline, the employee receives the paid time off at the normal rate, without the 75% premium. (The figures are illustrative; use the actual rate from the contract.)
The hard part is not the rule, but the discipline of applying it month after month. This is where the Workly time-tracking module comes in:
The internal assistant Modi answers questions about your own attendance data deterministically, without an external language model — so it does not “invent” figures and cannot hallucinate an answer. What you see comes from the company’s real records.
Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not tax or legal advice. The rules and the level of fines may change; always check the text in force at the official source (legislatie.just.ro, the Labour Inspectorate) or consult a specialist before taking decisions.
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